


Equal and Opposite

by viklikesfic (v_angelique)



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU, M/M, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-29
Updated: 2007-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:43:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_angelique/pseuds/viklikesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A uni!AU wherein Orlando is a science nerd and Elijah is a drama student, and there is a lot of nerdy porn.  This has been a long time in coming, with lots of revision, and I must give <i>much</i> thanks to my betas, without which this story would be a bit of nerdy drivel.  Hopefully, it's gone a bit beyond that by now ☺  So, kisses to all four of you!  And any errors remaining are entirely my own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equal and Opposite

The flat Midwestern accent was so completely at odds with the Anglicised words coming out of the kid's mouth that Orlando first thought of the young American as nothing more than a self-conscious parody. Hands flying in expressive arcs and jabs, he was talking much too loudly to the group of girls surrounding him at the bar, all perfectly coiffed and dressed in sweatshirts bearing the logos of various universities whose names Orlando had never heard. Orlando cursed under his breath when he realised that, in order to reach said bar and order a drink, he had no choice but to squeeze by the crowd of co-eds who were hanging on their companion's every word. His only advantage was that the girls were all extremely thin, which made navigating their clump a physical possibility. And Orlando was a metre away from the bar, almost home free and already raising his arm to signal for another Heineken, when disaster struck.

"Fuck!"

He watched the kid as if in slow motion, the wide-armed rotation not only sending his elbow flying into Orlando's ribs but also upsetting the foamy head of the kid's beer, sloshing onto Orlando's shirt as blue eyes went impossibly wide.

"Shit! I… I'm so sorry, man…"

Orlando glared impatiently as it became evident that the kid was stuttering not because he was nervous or guilty about what he had just done, but because he was trying very hard not to laugh. Arsehole.

"I'll buy you a…"

"Leave it," Orlando grunted. The kid looked almost hurt for a moment, his eyes widening again in that overgrown puppy dog sort of a way, but then he shrugged and turned back to his friends.

"Fine."

Orlando frowned, shook his head, and stepped up to the bar, pointing to the Heineken tap. He drank his pint quickly and irritably, his dampened shirt clinging to his chest as he watched the kid continue his big-armed and loud-mouthed conversation. Orlando, apparently, was already forgotten.

~*~

The student centre was nearly deserted as Orlando navigated the newly built glass-walled corridors on his way to the lab, but he liked it that way. Fewer crowds meant less annoying freshers, athletes, and other individuals bent on making Orlando's life more difficult. The culprit this time was Valentine's Day, a holiday about which Orlando was decidedly indifferent. When he had been younger, there were years when the day's very existence annoyed and even infuriated him. Now, however, he was comfortably single, and anything that cleared the majority of the student body from the campus could be considered a good thing.

An average day in the student centre consisted of Orlando ordering overpriced, horrible-tasting coffee, and running into at least twelve footie players or art students on the way. Occasionally, an Irish girl with her naturally red hair dyed bleach blonde in some twisted homage to California style would give him a disapproving look, and he'd look down at his plain dress shirt and tie, the leather briefcase he'd shelled out perfectly good money to finally purchase, and wonder what the fuck her problem was. Today, however, the fashionistas were taking their coffee elsewhere, and so Orlando felt little need to be wary of his surroundings.

As it was, he was lost in thought, his eyes on his shoes as he navigated the familiar layout of the student centre as a shortcut to the physics building. He had plans to alter a new variable in the construction of his project, and he was just running over the things he would need to test his idea when he came suddenly into contact with a hard surface.

"You again!"

Orlando's tone was positively venomous as the two men stumbled apart from each other, the other rubbing his funny bone as Orlando adjusted his glasses. He expected the little American to shit himself, or at least start stuttering again and apologise profusely, perhaps less smiley without all his friends around. What he didn't expect was for the kid, after a brief pause, to stick his right hand out and offer a mature reply.

"I'm sorry. I'm Elijah. Bloody inconvenient how we keep running into each other, isn't it?"

Orlando stared at the extended hand for a second before taking it, shaking briefly, and then pulling back and running a hand through his hair, utterly baffled. "I'm, erm… Orlando. Orlando Bloom."

Elijah laughed lightly, and Orlando started to bristle before he checked himself and willed his muscles to relax. "So… pretty dead around here today," Elijah commented, gesturing around his body with one hand at the empty corridor.

"Erm, yeah. It's Valentine's Day," Orlando replied slowly, as if Elijah were stupid, and wondering in the back of his mind if that might not be the case. "You know, the holiday where everyone who has a significant other buggers off to a romantic location and the rest of us get some work done?" His tone wasn't bitter, but simply matter-of-fact.

Elijah nodded. "So you don't have one, then?"

"Have one what?" Orlando asked, a little impatiently.

"A significant other."

He gave Elijah a suspicious look, then, and crossed his arms protectively in front of his chest. This was what he didn't like about Americans—their insistence on having story time every goddamned minute, the assumption that people wanted to talk about their lives. Orlando was a private person, and he didn't want to talk about his bloody love life with a perfect stranger.

"Look, that's none of your bloody…"

"Let me take you out to dinner tonight," Elijah quickly pre-empted, and Orlando wondered for a moment if he might look a bit like a fish, the way his mouth began to open and close of his own accord. Elijah smiled, seeming encouraged by the reaction, and ploughed on. "It's the least I can do, after all the literal running into you I've been doing lately."

_I can't. Ton of work to do, mate, need to be in the lab, don't usually eat dinner anyway…_

"Sure."

Orlando's eyes widened briefly, his mind surprised by his body's inadvertent response, and now it was too late to formulate an excuse. _If I do this, it's going to feel like a bloody date, and I don't go on **dates**, especially not with confident, heterosexual American men_, he wanted to say, but Elijah was grinning. Maybe the poor kid needed a friend. Maybe Orlando needed psychological help.

"Brilliant." And rather than wanting to correct him or tell him to use his own bloody language, this time Orlando found himself thinking the Britishism was cute. Cute. He clearly had lost his mind. "I'll meet you at seven by the front gate, then," Elijah continued when it was clear Orlando wasn't going to speak. "I know a place."

"But you… I…"

"Orlando," Elijah interrupted, still smiling. "Lighten up."

And before Orlando could respond, Elijah had darted around the corner and out of sight.

~*~

"This is actually really amazing," Orlando commented between bites of his shrimp linguine. "Thank you for suggesting it."

"I told you it would be," Elijah replied with a smile, stealing a piece of Orlando's garlic toast. "Thanks for coming out. I love to get away from campus when I can, but I don't know many people here yet. End up eating out alone half the time."

"What about your fan club?" Orlando asked, using his nickname for the crowd of American girls from that first night before he could stop himself. "Those girls…"

Elijah looked confused for a moment, and then recognition dawned on his face. "From the pub?" Orlando nodded, and he laughed. "I barely even know them, man. There was an orientation; the exchange program I'm with puts it together. Everyone studying in England and Wales does it together, a week in London before the start of the semester and then you disperse to your host universities. Those girls were headed to Cardiff after orientation, and the way the timetable worked out, it ended up being easiest to spend a night here and take the bus in the morning."

Orlando still looked sceptical. "You seemed pretty friendly…"

Elijah rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know. The straight girls always latch on to the gay guys for some reason. Couldn't get any of them to leave me the hell alone. But you know how it is, I'm sure."

And now, Orlando's mouth was definitely wide open. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Elijah gave Orlando a sideways glance for a moment before answering. "You're going to make me spell it out for you?"

Orlando didn't respond, and Elijah sighed.

"Fine. You're fucking hot, is what I mean." He laughed lightly, playing with the stem of his wine glass. "I'm sure you get the same effect multiplied with your female friends."

Orlando started doing his best fish impression for the umpteenth time, and then gulped down a large swallow of wine. "You're gay."

Elijah stared at him, incredulous. "Um, yeah. I may not be very well acquainted with the species, but I'm pretty sure your average straight male's reaction to bumping into someone, twice, is not to introduce himself and then ask said someone out on a date. Orlando."

Orlando felt his entire spine quiver with the way Elijah said his name, and tried not to think about that too much. _Natural reaction. Frequency of Elijah's voice. Vibrations. Has to be something like that. Nothing to do with the fact that Elijah thinks I'm "fucking hot," oh no. Not at all._

"This is a date?" he asked, and it came out embarrassingly like a squeak.

"Um, yes?"

Orlando looked around, and then back at Elijah, and finally nodded. "Okay."

Elijah smiled, and Orlando relaxed slightly in his seat. "So who told you?" he asked, sighing lightly. Whoever it was, he'd kill them. Maybe.

"Told me what?"

"You know. That I'm _gay_," Orlando explained, waving his hand around frantically for emphasis. Elijah's grin was broad, and Orlando felt a little too uncomfortably like the butt of a joke.

"No one told me. I have impeccable gaydar."

Orlando sighed. "No, seriously, Elijah. I promise I won't kill them." _Maybe_. "Just tell me."

"I _am_ serious," Elijah insisted.

"There's no such thing as gaydar!"

"Of course there is. You're just not looking hard enough."

"And you are?"

"I'm a theatre major. It's my job to observe."

"Right. That still doesn't explain how you figured out that _I_ was gay."

"In the student centre," Elijah replied. "The way you reacted when I asked you out. I knew one of two things—either you were flustered because you haven't been on a date in a really long time, or you were so busy being mad at me for spilling beer on your shirt before that you didn't know what to do when I actually turned out to be a nice guy, and therefore were so preoccupied with your confusion that it didn't even occur to you that I might _be_ asking you out. Though now I'd like to go with a synthesis theory of the two—you didn't realise that I was asking you out, _and_ you were flustered because let's face it, I'm dead sexy," he surmised, a teasing grin on his lips. "You then felt guilty for being attracted to me, the mean straight guy who you were supposed to be mad at."

Orlando stared at him for a moment. "You're good."

Elijah grinned. "I'll teach you sometime."

"What, will that be our second date?"

Elijah stared for a moment, and then slowly a wide grin came over his face, before his hand slammed gleefully down on the table, startling Orlando. "You know, man, I thought you were going to be pretty bloody boring at first. But I think I was wrong. I think you're all right."

Orlando just stared, not sure whether to be flattered or offended. "Erm… cheers."

~*~

"Him."

"What? No!"

"Why not?"

"Look at him. He's so _normal_ looking."

Elijah smiled to himself and gently reached over, taking Orlando's hand and lifting it up, pointing with it to one corner of the broad yard between classroom buildings. "Look where he's looking."

"Oh."

And sure enough, the "normal" student's eyes were locked on an attractive but oblivious young man at the corner of the yard as he walked, darting away only when the beauty looked up.

"See. Observant," Elijah said simply, still smiling. "He may be just as normal as _you_ are, but I pay attention to the subtle cues." Orlando rolled his eyes. "Seriously. It's bloody easy if you just keep an eye out."

Orlando nodded and was silent for a moment, scanning the yard for their next victim. "So here's what I don't get," he said after a moment with no luck. "You've been here only a month and yet you've already incorporated about half of our national vocabulary into your speech patterns. What's all that about?"

Elijah laughed and shook his head. "Didn't pick that up here. My best friend back at home is English," he explained. "He's the one who convinced me to do a year abroad in the first place, actually. Said you can't do bloody Shakespeare in America."

"Well he's right," Orlando agreed with a resolute nod, and Elijah giggled. Orlando wasn't sure he'd ever heard a grown man _giggle_ before, and it bothered him just slightly that the sound was more endearing than annoying.

"Well, anyway, he's from Manchester," Elijah continued. "England," he added unnecessarily, and Orlando snorted. "Where are you from?" Elijah asked after another moment.

"Canterbury."

"Like the Cathedral?"

Orlando rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Like the Cathedral. You know, I should take you on a tour of the country, sometime," he offered before he could stop himself. Where the hell did _that_ come from? But before he could retract, Elijah was answering, and his smile was so genuine that Orlando couldn't bear to change his mind.

"I'd like that."

~*~

A few days later, Orlando and Elijah ran into each other again at the student centre, this time in a queue for bad coffee in between lectures. Before his brain had time to actually do any thinking, Orlando found himself inviting Elijah to come and help him in the lab that afternoon, and to his surprise the younger man agreed.

As much as he didn't want to admit it, and despite how happy he considered himself with his status as a single man, Orlando had been thinking about Elijah quite a lot since their "second date." He'd always been a slow mover, cautious to a fault, but Elijah made him want to throw caution to the wind after a surprisingly short amount of time.

"You know, I've got a play coming up," Elijah announced as Orlando calibrated the motion sensors. "Auditions are next Friday. You should coach me."

Orlando looked up from the laptop and raised an eyebrow. "Coach you? In theatre?"

Elijah rolled his eyes. "Not in theatre. With my _accent_," he clarified, biting the ragged edge off a thumbnail as Orlando quickly looked away again. Yeah, he had his own bad habits, but that was just... "I can run some lines, you point out where I'm fucking up. If anything sounds funny."

"Oh, right. Okay. What's the play?"

"Hamlet."

Orlando nodded and continued working for a few minutes, nodding in satisfaction when everything was as he wanted it. Elijah looked sceptical at Orlando's enthusiasm when he rolled a little ball down a chute, read some numbers off the screen, and then started jumping up in down in excitement.

"Uh, Orlando?"

"Yes?"

"It's a ball. On a chute. Did you just discover gravity, cause I hate to tell you man; you're not the first."

Orlando just rolled his eyes. "It's part of a machine, Elijah. I'm doing this project for the lecturer I have an assistantship with… he works with some of the little ones at the school down the road, and we go over there on Fridays and do little projects and demonstrations with them, see. There are three other Master's candidates who work with him, and he's given us a challenge for the end of the year. We have to rig up a series of events, fifteen total, that will end in a plain rubber dart hitting a target. Then we set up our project at the school, and there's a competition with each class supporting one of the students. They make banners for us, come up with cheers, all sorts of things like that, to get them excited about science, and then we all set off our series while they watch. There are points for creativity, accuracy, speed, and the distance the dart travels at the end. Here, I'll show you."

Gesturing for Elijah to pull up a chair, Orlando started clicking through a series of screens, finally ending with a computer model of what looked a bit like a very complicated version of the game Mouse Trap.

"See, the ball in the chute is this part here, step three. I've been experimenting with different balls and different materials for the chute, as well as the angle of the chute itself, to get the most force out of it without letting the ball fly and miss its target at the end. And I just beat my own record."

"Oh…" Elijah replied slowly, looking through the various steps on the computer screen while Orlando waited patiently for him to understand. "Dude, that's actually pretty bloody amazing."

Orlando grinned proudly and then shook his head, clapping Elijah on the back. "You know, Elijah, I don't know if anyone's told you this, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but the words dude and bloody are actually mutually exclusive."

Elijah laughed. "Actually, yeah. Dom says that all the time."

Dom? Orlando frowned. "Who's Dom?"

Elijah looked at Orlando for a moment, and then a teasing smile spread slowly to the corners of his mouth. "You're jealous."

"No I'm not!" Orlando replied, much too quickly and a little too loudly.

Elijah grinned. "Yeah, man. Yeah you are."

Orlando bit his lip and turned back to the computer, pretending to pay attention to the diagram he already knew like the back of his hand. "Well. Maybe a little."

Elijah laughed, and leaned forward, smacking a kiss on his cheek. "Dom's my best friend. From Manchester." Tilting his head back and leaning in his chair at a rather precarious angle, Elijah kept laughing, shaking his head. "Oh Orlando, you bloody beautiful idiot."

Orlando's face darkened, the mirth of the moment gone from his expression as Elijah's endearment triggered a wave of memories. "Don't call me that," he said quietly, and Elijah stopped laughing, giving Orlando a concerned look.

"Sorry…"

"No, Elijah, I'm serious. Just don't… that hurts, okay? Especially coming from you. I know I look like a dumb pretty boy, but I've worked really hard to get to where I am. It's not exactly easy to get a degree in physics, or to get through school with a learning disability, or… or…"

Elijah frowned, and leaned forward in his chair, cutting Orlando off with a hand on each side of his face. He didn't speak until Orlando finally looked up and met his eyes, despite the twinge of embarrassment Orlando felt at his outburst, and when he did his tone was soft, his eyes gentle and understanding. "Orlando, I know you're not an idiot. You're a genius. An honest-to-God genius, you know." He paused, and then smiled. "But I promise not to call you that again."

"Thank you," Orlando replied, feeling strangely touched though his cheeks were flaming pink with embarrassment.

Elijah grinned and pressed a kiss to his forehead, before letting go and leaning back again. "I'll just call you a total fucking wanker instead."

Orlando rolled his eyes, but he couldn't help but fixate on the warm, wet patch now decorating his skin. He clearly needed to get out more. One little kiss, not even to the lips, and he was feeling like a fucking American teenager on her prom night. "That'll do," he murmured, distractedly, and went back to clicking through his computer screens.

He didn't even notice Elijah's triumphant smirk.

~*~

"This wine is for shit," Orlando grumbled as they sat in the student restaurant two weeks later, eating a meat-and-potatoes lunch. "Bloody French. Can't even trust their wine making skills anymore."

Elijah laughed and took the glass from him, downing a healthy swig. "You know, it wasn't actually the French who started making the wine. The Romans brought it there, so, if you need someone to blame, go with the Romans. "

Orlando gave Elijah a confused look. "First off, always blame the French, and secondly, how did you know that?"

"I'm a history major."

Orlando frowned. "I thought you were majoring in theatre!" What he wanted to say was, "who _are_ you, you confusing little fuck?" but he refrained.

"I'm doubling," Elijah explained.

"Oh. Well. Just full of surprises, aren't you?" he muttered. Elijah just smiled.

~*~

It was a surprisingly warm Saturday in April when Elijah invited Orlando to go to the records shop with him. Orlando had been trying to make up excuses, to spend more time in the lab and less time out in the sunshine with Elijah, an activity that he suspected was starting to alter the very makeup of his brain. The more he let Elijah coax him into new and sometimes quite unexpected activities, the more he began to think of Elijah in a romantic sense, and that frightened him. Elijah was impetuous, instinctual, and so very American. He was carefree. He did things, in Orlando's estimation, without thinking much about them, and he wasn't sure whether he could trust Elijah.

What the fuck were they, anyway? Friends? Boyfriends? Certainly not, as their "dates" had never been anything more than casual, but there was still a strange sense of something building. Orlando felt like a girl for thinking about it at all. However, it was hard not to fall into Elijah's net, and so after considerable cajoling Orlando found himself leaving the lab that Saturday and heading out into the bright sunshine across campus, walking towards town.

When they reached the main road, Orlando turned right, towards the Virgin Megastore a few blocks down, but Elijah simply rolled his eyes and grabbed Orlando's left wrist, tugging him sharply in the other direction.

"What the…"

"Not _that_ place, you idiot. Those CDs are mostly shit anyway, and the ones that aren't will put you out twenty quid. C'mon, this way."

And so Orlando followed Elijah to a quieter section of the street, back a few blocks, and into a shop so small and dingy it didn't even have a proper sign out front.

Inside, Elijah was transformed, chatting animatedly with the girl behind the counter, a student Orlando thought he maybe recognised from campus with bright violet hair and several lip piercings. He flipped through the vinyl selections with deft fingers, checking to see what was new in stock, and then moved on to the CDs.

"What kind of music do you like, Orli?"

Orlando looked up, startled, and cocked his head to the side. "Orli?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry," Elijah replied. "It's just what I call you in my head."

Orlando stared at him for a moment. "You talk to me in your head?"

Elijah's blush deepened. "Um… sometimes."

Orlando realised that this was the first time he had ever seen Elijah looking genuinely nervous or embarrassed, and the thought gave him strength. "Okay," he said with a smile. "So, music?"

Elijah smiled gratefully in return. "Yeah. What's your poison?"

Orlando shrugged. "I don't know. Whatever's fine. I like Bowie a fair bit. U2, erm… R.E.M."

Elijah sighed. "U2."

"What? They're good!"

"Were good. C'mon, man. I want you to listen to something."

Orlando frowned but didn't argue as Elijah pulled him by the elbow over to a CD player mounted on the wall with big black headphones and slid a case from the shelves, popping the disc into the player and skipping ahead a few tracks. Standing behind Orlando, he slid the headphones over Orlando's head himself and adjusted them to fit before hitting play.

The song itself wasn't bad, the singer's voice melodic and clear and the lyrics interesting with a steady drum beat and a high-pitched electric fiddle in the background, but Orlando couldn't be arsed to pay much attention, for Elijah didn't actually bother to leave him alone for the duration of the song, instead gripping the display shelf to either side of Orlando's hips and resting his chin on Orlando's shoulder so that Orlando had to keep his knees bent slightly to avoid dislodging it. Elijah's body was warm against Orlando's, and Orlando's eyes fell shut as he tried not to react.

"Well?" Elijah asked with an expectant grin as the song ended and Orlando replaced the headphones on their wooden peg.

"'S all right," he replied with a shrug.

"All _right?_" Elijah huffed and rolled his eyes. "You don't know your ass from your elbow, musically speaking, if you think that was just all _right_, Bloom."

Orlando frowned, following him across the store. "Fine. It was pretty good."

Elijah tossed a smile over his shoulder. "We'll work on you."

~*~

"Where do you go to uni in the States, anyway?" Orlando asked as they lay on the floor of his flat, surrounded by empty Chinese cartons. He obstinately bit into the ring of fried pineapple, even though he knew intellectually that the greasy dessert was far too hot to eat, and wondered as he felt the burn deep in his teeth and his mouth filled with saliva if good food could actually be responsible for mental regression.

"University of Iowa."

"Where's that?" he asked, mumbled around a mouthful of sugary goodness.

"Iowa City," Elijah replied with a smile. "Middle of the country and a bit to the right," he added helpfully.

"Do you miss it, then?"

"Fuck no. If I did I'd be going home for the summer."

"Oh, right. What are you doing for the summer, then? Working?"

"Can't. Not on a student visa."

"Oh. Just dossing about, then?"

"I guess." Elijah looked uncomfortable. "What about you? Going back to Canterbury?"

"Nah. I'm letting the flat throughout August. Sublets are too much of a bloody pain, and I couldn't do less than a year. I'll have my degree though, so I just need something to make money until I can get a "real" job. I don't know, after the work with the kids I'm thinking I might want to teach or something, but probably not for a while. Might get paid to do additional research, or teach some lower level courses here."

"Don't you do research now?"

"Yeah. Have to, to pay tuition. Have some funding as well. That's why I went here, rather than to Kent. Money."

Elijah nodded. "I just went to Iowa because it's close. It's an okay school."

"And here for the theatre?"

He nodded again and then grinned. "Also Eddie Izzard tells me, Europe is where the history comes from."

Orlando rolled his eyes. "Bloody well right. I'd think it'd be even more expensive for you, though."

"It is," Elijah said with a shrug, looking slightly annoyed again.

"What?" Orlando asked, feeling a bit miffed. "You can obviously afford it."

Elijah turned to look at him, and it was the first time Orlando had seen him really and truly _angry_, like Orlando's words had flipped some invisible switch. "I can _afford_ it because my father is a bloody wealthy asshole who settled out of court when my mother finally decided to tell someone that he'd been fucking beating her for fifteen years. And I can afford it because I refused to touch that bloody fucking compromise money and have been working part time since I was a kid and investing wisely to pay for my education. So don't judge me, Orlando. Not you."

Orlando stared for a long moment, and then reached across the empty cartons suddenly, tugging Elijah tight to his chest. "Jesus, Elijah. I didn't realise… just more proof that you're fucking amazing," he muttered, voicing thoughts into Elijah's hair that he had never spoken out loud. "I'm sorry, I… Jesus, I could never measure up to you, you know?"

Elijah pulled back and gave Orlando a quizzical look. "You're daft."

"Yeah, well I…" _Love you._ "… takes one to know one."

Elijah smiled and went back to his lo mein.

~*~

"So let's see… we've got the tea, the chocolate… oh, cookies. He wants a couple different kinds of cookies."

"Biscuits," Orlando corrected distractedly, peeking over Elijah's shoulder at the grocery list as they neared the proper aisle in the Tesco and then catching Elijah by the waist to keep him from overshooting it. Elijah, apparently, had been given a list of favourite foods from his best friend Dominic back in the States, which he was to acquire and send back through the post as quickly as possible. Orlando had been invited along as a "grocery consultant," in Elijah's words, because Elijah claimed he didn't understand a bloody thing about English people's taste buds.

"Jaffa Cakes. These things are so weird," Elijah commented as he threw a pack into the cart.

"Why? They're just normal biscuits."

"They're all spongy and strange."

"So what's normal to you, then?"

"I don't know. Oreo. Chips Ahoy."

"Right. Wait, there… Walker's shortbread, that's on the list right?"

"Oh, yeah. Thanks."

"No worries."

"Do you cook much?" Elijah asked as they continued on to the crisps.

"A fair bit, yeah. I mean, I live alone; I have to eat."

Elijah laughed and shook his head. "That's what microwave meals are for, man."

Orlando wrinkled his nose. "Those are a bit dear for my blood, ta very much. Cooking's easy enough, isn't it? You just read the recipe and measure out the amounts it says and put the food on the hob…"

"Not a very creative cook then, are you?"

"Creative? What's the point in getting creative with cooking? It's a science."

Elijah scoffed and threw a few packets of crisps into the cart. "Everything's a science to you. Cooking is art, not science."

"How is it art? There are measurements, and temperatures, and occasionally contents under pressure…"

"And presentation, and improvisation…"

They stopped in the middle of the aisle, suddenly grinning at each other, and then Elijah reached out and cuffed Orlando upside the head with a Yorkie bar.

"Dumbass."

"Wanker."

~*~

"It's not a bad flat," Orlando complimented as he glanced around the one-bedroom walk-up, throwing his rucksack in the corner and following Elijah to the kitchen when he went to get them a couple of beers.

Internally, Orlando was rejoicing that Elijah had finally let Orlando see his personal space—now that he was here, it seemed rather innocuous, but Orlando had privately wondered whether Elijah might not be hiding some secret here, or just want to keep a healthy distance between them. This felt natural; a step in the right direction. "Better than I had my third year," Orlando continued, accepting the beer Elijah offered him and popping it open before they returned to the living room. "Last year, rather."

Elijah shrugged and took a seat on the sofa as he toed off his shoes, gesturing for Orlando to do the same. "It's small but I like it. I used to hate my room at Iowa."

"Why's that?" Orlando asked, sitting at the opposite end of the couch but facing Elijah, his legs crossed in front of him.

"No privacy. Group showers. Double room."

"Oh. Yeah, double rooms are shite. I had a flatmate when I started at the university, but I got my own place after the first year."

"It was kind of stifling. We got along okay I guess, but he was some randomly assigned kid from California. Smoked a lot of weed."

"You don't smoke?"

"Sometimes. This kid though, smoked _all_ the fucking time. Occasionally in the room itself, which gave me a bit of a heart attack."

"Couldn't you swap?"

"Too much of a hassle second year. I shared an apartment with Dom last fall, but still it was pretty shitty. Private shower was nice but the walls were paper-thin. Couldn't even jerk off without knowing he was next door."

"Ah. Well I can see how that would be a downside," Orlando conceded, tipping the neck of his bottle towards his lips and taking a healthy gulp.

"Put a major cramp on my style."

Now Elijah was grinning, and Orlando rolled his eyes, though he too was smiling around the beer. "What are you, a wanking aficionado?"

"Oh, the very best," Elijah replied, setting down his own bottle to stretch his arms over his head and crack his knuckles dramatically. Orlando had to try very hard not to stare at the few inches of pale stomach exposed by the way Elijah's shirt tugged upwards, his legs sliding in to tuck more firmly underneath each other. It didn't help when Elijah's gaze suddenly flicked downward, resting momentarily on the slight bulge in Orlando's jeans before looking up with a wink.

"You complete bastard," Orlando muttered, blushing as he took another pull from the beer. Elijah's noticing didn't make matters any better, though, and in fact his cock decided to thicken further at the attention.

"Yes, that's me," Elijah agreed with a gleeful grin. "Utter fucking bastard. So tell me, Orlando. What about your wanking style? Think it measures up?"

Orlando stared for a minute. "Are you serious?"

"I'm just saying. You can't learn to love another properly until you can fully appreciate yourself."

"Oh you little bloody…" Orlando tried to dive forward, but Elijah scuttled back on the couch, his eyes teasing.

"Ah ah, Orlando. Tell me."

Orlando sat frozen for a moment. He watched Elijah's eyes, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Elijah to burst out laughing, but it didn't happen. Eljiah was serious, and Orlando let out a shaky breath as he leaned back against the cushions again. This time, a little more bold, he stretched one leg out against the back of the couch, his toes just brushing the outside of Elijah's hip. He put his other foot on the ground, making the rise in his jeans obvious, but he made no effort to hide it. Elijah could tease, fine. But, if this was how it was going to be, Orlando could certainly tease back.

"I'm a very sensory sort of a bloke," he replied, casually, rolling the bottle briefly against his crotch and hissing at the cool contact, pushing into it a bit before he pulled said bottle away and took a sip. He was somewhat relieved to find Elijah's eyes watching his movements hungrily. "I like light touches, you know, bit of a tease. Like to touch the rest of my body too, slowly, before I even get to my prick. Take my time, if I can."

Elijah sucked in a sharp breath, and met Orlando's challenging stare dead on. "Do you take all your clothes off, then? Before you start?"

Elijah's voice was low, almost whispered and dripping with the promise of sex, hot and dirty. Whatever reserve Orlando had been clinging to, however much he was trying to keep his sexuality hidden underneath his businesslike exterior to avoid embarrassment, his patience just _snapped_ at the tone of Elijah's voice. Not only had it been too long, but yeah, Elijah was going to be the best fucking sex he'd had in his _life_, restraint be damned. Orlando was sure of that.

"Sometimes," he replied, eyes following Elijah's fingers across the denim-encased path of his thigh like a sniper sighting out a target. He shifted his hips slightly, cocking them forward on the couch as he continued. "Sometimes I just take it out, though, let my fingers slide up underneath my clothes. It's erotic like that; I can imagine a lover, that we haven't bothered to undress fully because we're so desperate to have each other. What about you, Elijah? Do you have a good imagination?" Orlando raised one eyebrow, his hand shifting up underneath his own shirt to lightly graze over his stomach.

Elijah followed the hand with his eyes, his pupils dilating slightly as his own fingers clenched tighter on his thigh. "Impeccable," he murmured, leaning forward and reaching out, his hand coming close, close…

…and then skirting to the side at the last moment to take the beer bottle from Orlando's hand, his fingertips just brushing Orlando's knuckles before he pulled it loose and sat it on the floor, then leaned back again with a slightly evil grin.

"Do you want to know the kind of things I imagine, Orlando?"

Orlando nodded hastily, one hand gripping hard at the cushion to steady himself.

"I like to think about being taken, sometimes. Hard, fast… dry even," he began, the corners of his mouth drawing up just slightly at Orlando's just-audible whimper. "Half-clothed still, maybe in public even, something dangerous that wouldn't be practical in real life. Sometimes I think about being tied up, held down… and sometimes I think about other things, too."

"What… kinds of things?" Orlando asked, not bothering to hide the huskiness in his voice now, his fingers inching up under his shirt, drawing closer and closer to his left nipple.

"Fucking another man," Elijah replied, matter-of-factly. This time Orlando's whimper was louder, almost a moan. His fingers found the nipple, and they pinched down. Hard. "Up against a wall, or bent over a table… or maybe I'd be the one doing the tying up…"

"Fuck," Orlando gasped, his nail scraping over his hardened nipple as his other hand slipped just barely inside his trousers, stroking over his own hipbone as he watched Elijah with greedy eyes. "Tell me more," he demanded. "Where? Where do you do it?"

"Oh, the usual places," Elijah replied with a flirty little smile. "In the shower… in my bed… yesterday afternoon, right here on this couch."

"What were you thinking about?" Orlando asked, desperately, his hips jerking up against thin air, his hand holding them down as his other hand still played over his chest.

"You," Elijah answered, and Orlando moaned.

"No, seriously. The truth, Elijah."

"That is the truth."

"Jesus."

"I thought about you, about your bloody gorgeous smile and the way you talk to me and how you tried to be all cross with me when we met but you couldn't, you fucking couldn't, could you?"

"No…" Orlando agreed, the word a breathy moan as his hand shifted closer, gripping the inside of his thigh just at the junction where wiry curls brushed the back of his hand.

"No you couldn't, you bloody beautiful son of a bitch… you fucking _wanted_ me," Elijah hissed, fire in his eyes as he shifted and tipped forward onto his hands and knees in the centre of the couch, his hands just inches from Orlando's thighs.

"Yes," Orlando moaned, silently begging Elijah to come closer.

"Do you still want me, Orlando?" Elijah asked, leaning in until their lips were nearly touching. "Do you want this?"

"God, yes," Orlando whimpered, his hips pushing forward again, his cock impossibly hard without any friction to aid it.

And then Elijah was falling, pushing, slamming Orlando to his back, hands on Orlando's shoulders, falling between Orlando's legs and pushing his own erection into Orlando's, shifting their hips as one entity, his lips sliding against Orlando's ear and…

"Come," he whispered, pressing forward once more.

Orlando did.

~*~

A week later, and neither Orlando nor Elijah had mentioned that evening in Elijah's apartment, the way Orlando had soaked his jeans like a teenager from just one whispered word. Orlando almost wondered whether it had really happened, if he was just confusing his active fantasy life—wherein he was sexually expressive and completely confident—with the real world, where until Elijah at least he had kept to himself and occasionally wondered if he might be asexual, for all the action he'd been getting since his last boyfriend in sixth form.

"Old fashioned," he liked to call it, but really Orlando was just scared. He'd had sex, sure, but it had never measured up to his imagination—and now, with Elijah showing up in his life like some sort of a freak springtime electrical storm, he didn't know how to react. Keeping it casual was out of the question, now, but the more Elijah failed to mention that evening, the more paranoid Orlando became.

And so, a week later, Orlando had some work to do in the lab, finishing up his project for the school competition. Elijah was sitting a few tables down from him, reading lines aloud as he worked, while Orlando interrupted occasionally to correct the pronunciation of a word. Orlando, however, was getting increasingly agitated as the afternoon wore on, and Elijah was starting to notice.

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action—Soft, you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered."

"True love, that is," Orlando muttered to himself, a bit bitterly. Elijah narrowed his eyes at Orlando, who hadn't corrected one word in the entire 'to be or not to be' monologue, despite a few purposeful mistakes, and then crowed triumphantly.

"You're fucking turned on! I'm turning you on!"

"Shut up," Orlando mumbled, fidgeting with a screw. _What do you expect?_ he added mentally. _Going on about your 'bare bodkin' like that, bloke can't be helped…_

Elijah smiled to himself and then shrugged, nonchalantly. "Well I guess it can't be helped," he reasoned with a sigh, and Orlando's hands paused briefly in their movements. _Mind reader too now?_. "Shakespeare is sexy."

"Hey, physics can be sexy too," Orlando argued, looking up from his tinkering.

"Yeah?" Elijah replied with a grin, licking his lips. "Prove it."

Orlando frowned, thought for a moment, and then began. "Well, quantum mechanics are pretty sexy. You've got wave-particle duality, see. Light is made up of billions of tiny particles, but it _also_ behaves as a wave…"

"Oh baby," Elijah interrupted in a dramatic, breathy moan. "Talk nerdy to me." Orlando stared for a moment, watching Elijah about to break out into giggles, then narrowed his eyes and shifted tack slightly. Apparently, this audience was going to require going slightly lower brow.

"Perhaps I should explain waves first, then. A wave is made up of two parts," he explained, abandoning his project to stalk slowly across the lab to Elijah's chair and casually toss the script in his hand aside before swinging one leg over Elijah's lap and slowly lowering himself downward. "A crest…" His hand slid between their bodies, his hips slipping back after one delicious roll to allow his palm to press just so on Elijah's crotch, delighting in the slight twitch he could feel even through Elijah's jeans. "…and a trough." His other hand trailed down Elijah's back, sneakily slipping under the waist of his jeans and lower so that one slender finger brushed the point where Elijah's arse begun to divide, just above the limit of the chair.

As Orlando pulled back again, standing smoothly, Elijah blinked, gulped, and then replied in almost perfect Elizabethan English. "Though this be madness," he mused, sliding into character as he rose from his chair, voice silky and seductive. "Yet there is method in 't." Orlando watched as Elijah hopped up onto the table, legs slightly spread. "I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion," he continued, knees parting further as he dredged up the lines of any play he could think of from the recesses of his mind, bulge clearly outlined below his fly. "Self-love, my liege," he finally purred, raising one eyebrow in invitation as he slid one hand down his body, fingers curling oh-so-slowly to finally cup his own crotch as Orlando looked on in hunger, "is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting."

_Oh yeah. Game on._

"The important properties of a wave," Orlando replied, dropping his voice an octave as his hand slowly crept down his body in imitation of Elijah's own, stopping to tweak a nipple and then to casually push up the bottom of his shirt, dipping briefly into the navel, "are wavelength, amplitude, frequency, and period. Now the wave_length_," he continued, his hand now palming his own crotch, the heel of it stroking in a slow downward motion to compliment his words, "is the distance between two crests," he explained, pushing his hips subtly forward on a one-two beat. "The period is the time it takes for a complete cycle of oscillation," he continued, hips slowly pushing against his static hand, eyes locked on Elijah. "And the frequency is the number of periods per unit of time. Waves can be high frequency." Quick pulse, cock hardening immediately against his sweaty palm. "Or low frequency." Slow, seductive roll of the hips, tip of a tongue trailing across the lower lip. "And then, of course, there's rectilinear propagation," he added with a deadly little smirk.

Elijah was breathing heavy now, his hand not moving but cupped firmly in place around his erection, his eyes locked on Orlando's. Taking a deep breath, he adopted his best warning tone and let his hand trail from his cock to his inner thigh, slowly stroking the cord of muscle as he raised an eyebrow in Orlando's direction. "These violent delights have violent ends," he recited, scooting back on the table slightly. "And in their triumph die, like fire and powder. Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness and in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; too swift arrives as tardy as too slow."

"Looking for slow, are you?" Orlando replied, grinning as he too hopped up on the table behind him, facing Elijah, and indulged in a full body stretch, arms over his head, belly exposed for an instant in a mimicry of Elijah's tease the previous week before he returned to a casual position. "Well then. Perhaps I should tell you about rigid body kinetics," he suggested, moving a hand down his own body as he said the words. "Those are all about fixed points… of course then you have your rotational energy," he teased with a slow, seated swivel of his hips, "and I probably shouldn't be telling you about screw motion representation at all. You might after all think me," he teased, his voice absolutely deadly and dripping with seduction in Elijah's ears, "a dirty, dirty whore."

"Praised by the gods for thy foulness," Elijah muttered to himself. "Sluttishness may come hereafter."

Orlando opened his mouth as if to reply, but Elijah quickly rebuffed him, spitting out a sonnet he'd had to memorise in high school in an effort to turn the tables and slow the flow of his own blood southward, if even just a little. "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action; and till action, lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, past reason hunted, and no sooner had past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad; mad in pursuit and in possession so; had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; a bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

Orlando smiled wickedly, both men sitting now stock-still and staring at each other, daring the other to make the next move. "So it's action you want?" Orlando slid, slowly, from the table, and stepped forward, the image of an animal stalking its prey. "It's action you'll get." Elijah let out an embarrassing squeak as Orlando stopped, groin just an inch from the space between Elijah's knees, hands braced on the table at either side of Elijah's hips. He leaned in, lips a centimetre from Elijah's earlobe. "Did you know, Elijah," he began, his lips tracing Elijah's ear from a hair's breadth away as he spoke, and then continuing down the neck, never touching, "that every body on the planet is attracted to every other body by a minute gravitational force?" Elijah moaned in spite of himself, feeling the ghost's kiss as if Orlando's lips were touching him—now his jaw, now his cheek, now spoken directly over his lips. "Every single thing has a measurable pull to every other thing. Did you know that?"

"O, how ripe in show thy lips," Elijah whispered, his breath warm on Orlando's mouth, teasing between Orlando's slightly parted lips. "Those kissing cherries, tempting grow!"

"What about momentum?" Orlando continued, ignoring Elijah's comment as his hand traced now in mimicry of his lips over Elijah's thigh, still just a millimetre away from touching. "Do you know about momentum, Eljiah?"

Elijah shook his head, his lips a butterfly brush to Orlando's with the movement, and then suddenly moved to the side, leaning in, hissing seductively into Orlando's ear. "Well heaven forgive him! And forgive us all! Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." And then the spell was broken, Elijah's body canting upwards, pressing full-length against Orlando.

Orlando growled and slid back quickly, tugging Elijah with him and turning them as one body so that he faced the opposite table before stalking slowly across the lab, using the momentum of his body to back Elijah towards it.

"Two bodies in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force," he growled, his voice unconsciously rising and falling in a cadence to match Elijah's Shakespearean metre.

The outside force, it turned out, was the lab table, the edge of it catching the back of Elijah's thighs, but he kept going with his upper body, his back arching, laying himself out and conducting a full body _writhe_ that had Orlando's jeans feeling impossibly tighter.

"Oh trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again!" Elijah cried, his accented voice breathily high and gasping, as if on the verge of ecstasy. Something in Orlando snapped, and he grabbed the front of Elijah's shirt hard, tugging him up so that he hung in mid-air, his body at an angle forty-five degrees from vertical and Orlando's forearm bulging with the effort as he fixed an icy glare on Elijah, nose-to-nose.

Orlando could see Elijah's throat muscles working as he bent his knees, his nose almost brushing against Elijah's sternum, and then pressed himself up against the boy, _dragging_ his body upwards slowly, slowly, until—

"Do you know the _friction_ coefficient of denim, Elijah?" he purred in Elijah's ear, towering over him now, and Elijah gasped and pushed his hips up hard, his hands falling back to brace himself against the table, his eyes falling shut.

"Fuck me," he gasped, all traces of the Elizabethan gone from his voice.

Orlando's grin was slow, wicked, and utterly sexy in its triumph. He leaned in, and bit down hard on Elijah's earlobe. "That's not Shakespeare," he quietly sing-songed.

There was fire in Elijah's eyes as he thrust his hips up again, shamelessly pressing himself against Orlando's thigh with each syllable. "Oh trespass sweetly _fucking_ urged," he groaned. "Give me my sin again, I told you!"

Sensing a non-sequitur, but too far gone to quite follow the segue, Orlando hazily mumbled a "what?" as he trailed his lips up Elijah's neck and tried to rock in counterpoint to the now desperately gyrating body beneath him.

"That's _fuck me_," Elijah groaned, reaching between them and cupping Orlando's crotch in a fucking _beautiful_ squeeze, "in iambic pentameter."

"Ohhhh," Orlando moaned in response, pressing up once, twice. He wanted to obey, really he did, he wanted to turn Elijah over and fuck him over the table to his heart's content, but synapses were firing at an alarming rate and all he could do was moan, buck, and… and…

"_Ah_!"

His body tensed and clenched as he came, hard, soaking the front of his jeans against Elijah's small pale hand, but then Elijah was desperately humping Orlando's thigh, the words mumbled against his neck enough to make Orlando's still-softening cock twitch in empathy.

"Fuck me, fuck me, oh yes, God, you bloody _beautiful_ bastard, yes, yes, yes, oh _Christ_ yes…"

And through his own post-orgasmic haze, feeling the clench and press of the other man's hips stuttering to a stop, Orlando vaguely registered how utterly odd it was that Elijah was completely silent when he came.

~*~

The next time they saw each other was only a day later. Orlando found himself irrationally relieved when Elijah called and invited him to come study in Elijah's flat, even though he was pretty sure by now that they were on the same page, for he never would've been able to handle his embarrassment if his little sexual performance had been badly received.

The pretext for the afternoon was another study date. Orlando was almost finished with his project and was focusing now on his final research presentation, for which he was only marginally prepared. Or at least, that was the plan.

"God, you're so fucking sexy," Elijah murmured. Orlando looked up, surprised, and found Elijah staring at him from where he sat on the other side of the sofa, his script neglected in his lap.

He gave Elijah a baffled look and pushed his glasses up on his nose before shaking his head and returning to his book. "I'm just studying… just being me," he argued, smiling to himself before tucking his pencil between his teeth to flip to a reference in his textbook.

"Fuck, I know," Elijah growled, unpredictably diving forward and pulling the pencil out of Orlando's mouth, tossing it over his shoulder and sweeping the book to the floor as well before he smashed his lips against Orlando's.

The way Orlando groaned into this, their first kiss, Elijah could feel the vibrations all the way down to the base of his spine, and Orlando in turn felt a secret thrill at the way Elijah gasped, grabbed Orlando's hips, and sucked the air from Orlando's lungs like a dying man. They were grappling, wrestling for control, studying forgotten as one overenthusiastic roll pitched them onto the floor, and then Elijah was giggling and Orlando was grinning and he didn't know what was important anymore.

"I love you," Elijah whispered as he slid the glasses from Orlando's face and set them on the coffee table instead, his fingers surprisingly tender in the way they traced his jawbone.

Orlando coughed and stared for a moment. He had never seen Elijah looking… vulnerable.

"You do?"

"Yeah," Elijah agreed, smiling as he brushed his hand through wayward curls. "I do."

"Oh," Orlando breathed, pressing upward against the weight of Elijah's body. "Okay. I…"

"Shhh." Elijah stopped the oncoming syllable with a finger pressed over Orlando's lips. "You'll say it when you need to."

Orlando frowned, and then nodded. Did he love Elijah? He thought he did. But he liked the idea. He liked coming to it in his own time "All right," he agreed, and kissed Elijah again. There _would_ be time.

~*~

Orlando had never much liked exams time. And now it was almost time for him to present his research, the accumulation of all the past year's work and the only ticket he had to a university degree. No matter how many times he 'd been over his notes, his heart was still pounding in his ribcage like a hamster on a wheel on speed, and he couldn't stop obsessively reviewing, hoping that one more iota of knowledge might seep in before the presentation. Tomorrow.

"Hey Orlando."

"Yeah?" he asked, sighing distractedly. Elijah meant well, but he needed to stop bloody popping up all the time. Didn't he have a play to rehearse for?

"The thing you've gotta ask yourself," Elijah replied, tugging on the lapels of his tailored grey suit as Orlando slowly looked up from his work. "Is 'do I feel lucky today?'"

"Holy _hell_."

Elijah licked his lips, slowly, and smiled. "Ain't nothing holy about what I plan to do to you, baby." He paused a beat, stepped forward, and leaned down, an inch away from Orlando's face with a wild grinning gleam in his eyes. "Punk."

"Elijah, what are you…" Orlando tried to wipe the answering grin from his features, but he couldn't. Elijah was just too… Elijah.

"Shh. C'mon, baby. We're going out."

"_What?_ No, Elijah. Just no. I've got my presentation to make tomorrow, and…"

"I'll have you home by midnight, Cinderella. C'mon. You're killing yourself, Orli. Come out with me tonight; take your mind off it. You know your brain needs periods of rest to absorb new information."

"That's bullshit, Elijah. Did I ever tell you I did an A-level in biology?"

"Well then too bad, Dr. Bloom. I'm afraid you're just going to have to get a ninety-nine percent mark on your research, for I am bound and determined to steal you away."

"I'm never going to _be_ a Dr. Bloom if you keep…"

"Orlando? Shut it."

~*~

As he proceeded through his defence, listening to the committee's comments and making notes on a legal pad with his trusty blue Biro, Orlando grinned to himself. As much as he tried to concentrate on the stodgy old men across the table, he was really thinking of last night, of tikka masala and palak paneer and the creamy trail their dessert left on Elijah's lips, the sweet cream Orlando was bold enough to lean across the table and lick away, aided by the two glasses of rose wine he'd consumed, and the way Elijah looked so fucking _irresistible_ in a suit.

After the Indian food, they'd walked hand in hand back to campus, and Orlando had shown Elijah the view from the roof of the physics building, the way the stars spread out on the inky canvas of almost-midnight like a blanket. Joking, Elijah had said then that Orlando should've been an artist, or a poet. Orlando blushed and bit his lip and kissed the stubbly beginnings of a goatee on Elijah's chin. He told Elijah that he loved him.

Orlando grinned and gave himself one more moment to indulge in memory before turning his mind back to electromagnetic fields.

~*~

"I'm a nervous wreck."

"You're going to be _fine_, Elijah. You're brilliant."

"I'm bloody _Hamlet_! How the hell did I get this part, anyway? I'm just some Midwestern hick from…. mmphhghg…"

Orlando grinned triumphantly as he finally released Elijah's lips, the rest of the dressing room politely ignoring their little display. Elijah looked vaguely shocked.

"You'll be _fine_, Elijah. You got the part because you were the best man for it, because you're a bloody brilliant actor and I'm proud to call you my boyfriend."

Elijah grinned, suddenly, and smirked. "Boyfriend?"

"Oh piss off," Orlando grumbled, though a smile was threatening at the corners of his mouth. "I'm going to go find my seat."

"All right, lover boy! See you after curtain!" Elijah called to his boyfriend's retreating back.

~*~

"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" Elijah cursed, stalking across the stage in a manner that made him appear much larger than his actual height. "Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a _dream_ of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit…"

Orlando had heard the lines a thousand times, of course, as in the past couple of months they had been spending more and more time in each other's flats, or together in the library or the student centre or the lab. But it was quite another thing entirely to see Elijah, alone on the stage, his voice so powerful as he spun the web of a soul in torment, his delivery so effective that for a moment Orlando could actually believe him to be mad.

Elijah's speech was building now, his volume increasing and the words flying out of his mouth as he cursed the man who had sullied his name (or Hamlet's, rather, Orlando had to briefly remind himself). And then his voice was quiet for a moment, so that the audience could barely hear it before his pace picked up again. "Bloody, bawdy villain!" he exclaimed. "Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, _kindless_ villain!" Orlando watched Elijah's lips forming the words, easily trilling over the difficult row of adjectives and his cock throbbed slightly in his trousers.

And then suddenly Elijah turned, a mad gleam in his eye, and though he addressed the audience at large his gaze was pinned so knowingly on Orlando that he jumped slightly in his seat and could not look away. "I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions."

_Oh yes,_ Orlando hissed in his mind, the fire in his eyes transferring to Elijah's in a private moment until at last the actor looked away. _I'll proclaim my malefactions, all right. Consider them proclaimed._

~*~

"My God, Elijah, you were _amazing!_ Even _I_ believed you were bloody insane up there!" Orlando exclaimed, scooping Elijah into his arms in the dressing room, fellow students be damned, and swinging him around in a wide circle before pressing an enthusiastic kiss to his tinted lips.

"Really?" Elijah asked, exuberantly. "God, it was such a fucking _rush!_ So much cooler than back at home… I think I might audition for a play this summer, I just… God, I've got to do this again."

"You should, you should," Orlando agreed. "Long as you'll let me help you with your lines again," he added with a little wiggle of the eyebrows, sending Elijah into vociferous laughter.

"I saw you," Elijah whispered harshly in Orlando's ear, suddenly pressing their bodies together against the makeup counter. "Act II, Scene II. You were bloody hot for me, weren't you Orlando?"

Orlando stifled a groan and grabbed at Elijah's arse in response, his hands shielded by the counter. "You know I was," he growled, and Elijah's look as he pulled back was of absolute glee.

"Let me just get my makeup off and then we can…"

Elijah was cut off by Orlando's hand tight around his wrist, a dark gleam in searching brown eyes. "Leave it."

~*~

There was nothing prettier, Orlando decided, than Elijah on his knees, lips stained slightly pink and wrapped around Orlando's cock. His cheeks were rouged and hollowed; his eyes were rimmed in kohl and unblinking. Orlando's hand tightened in Elijah's hair, and he allowed himself one long, unrestrained thrust down the length of Elijah's throat before he pulled back, his cock streaking Elijah's lips with moisture as it slipped out of his mouth. Elijah blinked, but he didn't lick it away.

"How do you want me?"

"_Christ_," Orlando groaned, tugging Elijah up clumsily to his feet, slamming their lips together and licking the taste of his own precome from Elijah's mouth. "Over the sofa," he finally replied in a mutter smashed sideways against Elijah's mouth, propelling the younger man across the room. "Wait," he requested once he had Elijah pressed up against the back of the ratty piece of furniture, pressing a finger to Elijah's lips before he dashed off to the bedroom in search of condom and lube. When he returned, Elijah was bent over the back of the couch, still wearing his tight black theatre department t-shirt but naked from the waist down, legs spread and hands holding pert cheeks open.

Orlando's jaw literally dropped.

"Fuck me," he muttered, and Elijah grinned, turning to look at Orlando over his shoulder as Orlando hurriedly squeezed some lubricant onto his fingers.

"I was kind of hoping that was going to be your job, actually."

"Fine then," Orlando agreed, a smile coming to his own face as he slid two of his fingers easily inside the tight pucker. "Fuck you."

"_Jesus_, yes."

"That's what I like to hear," Orlando mumbled, grinning against the back of Elijah's neck as he slowly worked his fingers further in and twisted back and forth a couple of times. "You look fucking _amazing_ like that, you know."

"Thanks," Elijah replied in a gasp as his eyes flinched shut and he made a conscious effort to let Orlando in. "Touch me?" he asked, his hands going from his arse to the sofa in front of him, resting on his elbows as he pushed further back on Orlando's fingers to create some space between himself and the sofa.

"Oh yeah," Orlando agreed, and his free hand ventured downward immediately to fondle Elijah's bollocks, then lower, stroking the length of his cock in slow, measured movements. "Open up for me baby, c'mon," he murmured, scraping his teeth along Elijah's nape, and Elijah gasped and obeyed, whimpering as he rocked between Orlando's hand and his fingers.

"Jesus, Orli. Now. Can't fucking wait."

"You sure?"

"Positive, God damn it, just use a lot of lube. Need you."

Orlando bit his lip as he withdrew his fingers, getting the condom on as quickly as humanly possible and slicking himself with an excessive amount of lubricant, not bothering to push his trousers down in his haste to be inside Elijah.

"_Fuck_," Elijah groaned as Orlando pushed, slowly, the head of his cock just breaching Elijah's hole before he paused, letting Elijah adjust to the throbbing inside him. "God, Orli, fucking do it," he muttered, and Orlando gave up on patience, steadying himself with one hand on Elijah's right shoulder and the other on his left hip before he pushed in, and kept pushing, not stopping until he was bollocks-to-arse inside of him.

"Yeah, _God_," Orlando groaned, biting down on the back of Elijah's neck as the hand on his hip dipped to cup Elijah's cock instead, rubbing gently. "You're bloody _amazing_, Eljiah. Amazing."

"Then fucking do me," Elijah spat out, rolling his body back against Orlando, until Orlando snapped and leaned down, his hand again shifting—this time to the back of the couch—to keep from slipping out as he aligned himself along the length of Elijah's back and thrust, hard. "_Fuck_ yeah."

"Like that?" Orlando murmured, his teeth pressing down a few centimetres away to make another mark, symmetrical, parallel to the first. "I fucking _love_ it."

"Oh, yeah," Elijah agreed. "Goddamn, Orli, fuck me, oh God…"

"Yeah…" Orlando replied, adding two more bite marks to his canvas, rocking his hips in a hard, pointed rhythm. "So fucking _pretty_," he murmured, lips brushing a blush-pink cheek, and Elijah growled.

"Not a fucking girl, asshole."

"No," Orlando agreed. "You're a _fucking_ man, and your _mine_." He punctuated the statement with a press of his teeth to Elijah's cheekbone, a move that normally would have gotten him smacked, but Elijah just moaned and clenched down with his arse.

"You're fucking crazy," he murmured, but there was more awe and admiration in his tone than anything, and Orlando couldn't help but feel pride. _Not just a science geek now, am I? Punk._ He giggled as he realised his inner voice was starting to sound a bit like Elijah.

"Yeah, I think I am," he murmured against Elijah's jaw, laughing, kissing him sloppily, his thrusts uneven, and he gasped as Elijah suddenly tightened up around him and let out a high-pitched gasp that could only mean one thing. "Oh fucking _hell_," Orlando groaned. "That's fucking _beautiful._"

"Jesus… Jesus…" Elijah muttered, his arsehole still shivering violently around Orlando's cock, his head dropping to hang between his arms. "God, that's good… so… fuck… tender… fuck me…"

Orlando decided, right then and there, that he was the luckiest son of a bitch alive.

~*~

After the first few weeks of summer, the allure of not having to study wore off. As Elijah's boredom mounted he tried to concentrate on preparing for auditions for the community production of "Much Ado About Nothing," but he spent most of his afternoons thinking instead about Orlando, who was working weekdays doing research for one of the physics lecturers. By the second weekend in June, Elijah was ready to get out of town.

"We're going on holiday," he had insisted, producing the train tickets with seat reservations already made before Orlando could argue. "You said you wanted to show me England, did you not? Well here we are. First stop."

And Orlando had grumbled and complained a little about the first stop being Dover, which wasn't much of a holiday as far as he was concerned, but then Elijah showed him the little cottage he had rented for the weekend on the Internet, and he had to admit the idea of a weekend alone on holiday with Elijah had its merits.

"Hey look, over there!" Elijah exclaimed, pointing to a spot beyond the Channel where the morning haze was just starting to burn off. "I think I see France!"

Orlando rolled his eyes and took a seat on the bench, overlooking the water crashing below. "Don't know why you're always on about the bloody French…"

"C'mon, Orli. It's France. It's romantic."

"Paris is romantic. Calais is… shit."

Elijah pouted and pursed his lips, tilting his head to the side until Orlando sighed and kissed him. "C'mon, now. Don't be a grump. I'm glad I have you here with me, wherever 'here' is."

Orlando smiled slightly in spite of himself. "Thanks, love."

"Any time. Now are you going to help me with my lines?"

Orlando groaned. "Elijah, I thought we were on holiday…"

"These are fun ones. Come on, please?" he begged, producing a folded photocopy of the script from the pocket of his pea coat. "I need to be ready for the audition next week."

"Oh all right, Benedick. What am I reading?"

"Start from here. All the other parts, though it's mostly Beatrice."

"I'm the girl."

Elijah giggled. "That you are, dearie," he agreed in a poor imitation of a gritty London accent. "Come on then, it's not so bad."

"Right. From here?" Elijah nodded. "Okay. Go ahead."

"Soft and fair, friar. Which is Beatrice?" Elijah asked, looking around dramatically. Orlando rolled his eyes and answered.

"I answer to that name. What is your will?"

"Do you not love me?"

"Why no," Orlando replied, pretending to be surprised. "No more than reason."

"Why then your uncle and the prince and Claudio have been deceived," Elijah argued. "They swore you did."

"Do you not love me?"

"Truth, no," Elijah sighed. "No more than reason."

Orlando grinned as a particularly loud wave crashed and adopted his best coquettish look. "Why then my cousin Margaret and Ursula are much deceived; for they swear you did."

"They swore that you were almost sick for me."

"They swore that you were well-nigh _dead_ for _me_," Orlando countered, inching closer on the bench and unable to hold back his grin.

Elijah slapped his knee before moving on. "'Tis no such matter. Then you do not love me?"

"No, truly, but in friendly recompense." Orlando paused, and then realised the next line was him as well, pitching his voice a bit lower for Leonato. "Come, cousin, I am sure you love the gentleman."

"You again," Elijah prompted quietly when Orlando missed Claudio's line.

"Oh, right. And I'll be sworn upon't that he loves her," Orlando continued. "For here's a paper written in his hand, a halting sonnet of his own pure brain, fashion'd to Beatrice. Say, Elijah, why do you never write me sonnets?"

Elijah rolled his eyes. "Your line still."

"And here's another," Orlando replied in a higher voice for Hero. "Writ in my cousin's hand, stolen from her pocket, containing her affection unto Benedick." And at that, Orlando burst into uncontrollable giggles.

"What?" Elijah asked impatiently, frowning.

"Is that a…" Orlando gasped, held a hand up for Elijah to give him a moment, and then tried again, sucking in his giggles. "Is that a Shakespearean sonnet in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"

Elijah rolled his eyes. "A miracle! Here's our own hands against our hearts," he recited. "Come, I will have thee," he continued, and again Orlando had to bite his tongue against the urge to laugh. "But, by this light, I take thee for pity."

"I would not deny you," Orlando finally replied once his giggles were under control. "But, by this good day I yield upon great persuasion; and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption."

"Peace!" Elijah interrupted, now grinning as he leaned in, his fingertips against Orlando's lips. "I will stop your mouth."

And then Orlando grinned as Elijah leaned in, and tugged the younger man tight against him so that the kiss went on much, much longer than Shakespeare had probably intended.

"Um…what's my line?" Elijah asked, breathless, when they finally broke apart, and Orlando grinned.

"You, love, clearly need more practising," Orlando teased, tapping Elijah on the nose before bending to kiss him again.

"Practising what, now that's the only question," Elijah mumbled, and Orlando just laughed against his lips.

"I thought 'to be or not to be?' was the question."

"Hamlet's over, asshole. Now kiss me."

"Okay."

~*~

"Move in with me."

"What?"

Orlando's eyes were dark with passion but his tone was serious, and Elijah scooted closer to him underneath the duvet, their bodies slick with sweat from a Sunday morning spent in bed.

"I want you to move in with me," Orlando repeated, tracing one fingertip along the line of Elijah's jaw.

"For the summer, you mean?"

"No. Until the end of the year. Until you go home for Christmas."

"But… I mean… I thought you wouldn't want to get too involved…" Elijah trailed off, looking away until Orlando turned his head back with a finger under his chin.

"I want to get involved with you. I already _am_ involved with you. And if we've only got six more months, well, let's enjoy them."

Elijah smiled, and pressed his lips to Orlando's. "You devil," he murmured.

Orlando laughed and kissed him again. "All your fault. You know, I was nice and normal before you came along. Never took risks…"

"Nice and _boring_," Elijah huffed. "Besides, I… well I have a maybe-surprise for you."

"A maybe-surprise? What's that?"

"Well nothing's set in stone, but you know I graduate in May, right? After my last semester in the States?"

"Right…" Orlando agreed, his finger tracing Elijah's breastbone now.

"I want to come back," Elijah admitted, holding his breath.

Orlando's finger froze in its path.

"Back? You mean… back, back? Back here? With me?"

Elijah smiled. "Yeah, I… well I want to do theatre, you know, and it's best here. I might study some more, maybe try to get into RADA…"

"But wouldn't there be more for you in London?" Orlando argued. "Or New York, even…"

"Well you're nowhere near New York, so no. And I can take the train to London. Besides, there's nothing tying you here, is there? You could maybe, I don't know, find a job somewhere closer to the city, find a place for us and then I'll come join you when I can…"

The grin threatening to escape finally broke open, and Orlando hugged Elijah tight to his chest. "You're serious about this."

"I've always been serious about this," Elijah countered, and Orlando smiled, laying his palm over Elijah's heart and pressing a slow kiss to his lips.

"We'll see how it goes, then?"

"Yeah," Elijah agreed with a smile. "Let's see how it goes."


End file.
